“‘A sad tale’s best for winter’: Caillois, Bataille, Girard, Shakespeare”

I. Shakespeare’s winter tragedies

According to Georges Bataille, “our tragedies and comedies are the continuation of

ancient sacrifices; if human life did not contain this violent instinct, we could dispense with

the arts”, and indeed many anthropologists have acknowledged that “blood sacrifice was a

manifestation of barbarity at the heart of civilization”.1 Richard Marienstras also agrees that

“…wildness can erupt at the very heart of the civilized”,2 an idea echoed by Philip

Brockbank’s “What we may take to be remote, pagan and even barbaric rites persist and

flourish in complex urban civilizations and in finely tempered urbane communities… 3 Now,

Shakespearean tragedy, if we think of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar or Macbeth, can

indeed be regarded as a ‘barbarous and bloody spectacle’ (2 Henry VI, 4.1.144). Bataille’s

own obsession with sacrifice in relationship with sex and death as well as Roger Caillois’s

considerations in L’homme et le sacré, a book that cast interesting sidelights on

Shakespearean tragedy, in which festive occasions introduce links between such primitive

rites as the Lupercalia (in Julius Caesar) and the ambivalent interpretations of political

assassination with its tension between openly acknowledged intentions and more secret or

unconscious motives.

In Shakespeare and French Theory, Richard Wilson has rather harsh words for the

“so-called Collège de Sociologie”, which, he claims, took its cue from Nietzsche and

Heidegger’s “dark sacrificial poetics”.4 This may be so, but the real tutelary figures behind the

Collège (the last avant garde literary group according to Denis Hollier’s study) 5 were the

anthropologists Marcel Mauss and Georges Dumézil. The brief existence of the group, from

November 1937 to July 1939 should not conceal its strong intellectual influence as, among its

regular participants, it included such people as Anatole Lewitzky, a disciple of Marcel Mauss,

Denis de Rougemont, Jean Wahl, Pierre Klossowski, Alexandre Kojève, with the occasional

participation of Walter Benjamin, Julien Benda and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. According to

1 Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton, London, 2001, p. 69-70.2 Richard Marienstras, New Perspectives on the Shakespearean World, trans. Janet Llyod, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 5-6.3 “Blood and wine: Tragic Ritual from Aeschylus to Soyinka”, Shakespeare Survey 36, p. 11.4 Richard Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory. King of Shadows, London and New York, Routledge, 2007, p. 58-9.5 Le Collège de Sociologie, Paris, Gallimard, 1995.

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Carlo Ginzburg, both Caillois and Bataille took their themes and inspiration from unpublished

work by Dumézil, which was to appear a little later in 1939, under the title of Mythes et dieux

des Germains, the year after and in the same Gallimard collection as L’homme et le sacré. In a

letter dated June 22 1938, Mauss writes to Caillois that he is the victim of some absolute

irrationality under the influence of Heidegger, whom he calls “un Bergsonien attardé dans

l’hitlérisme, légitimant l’hitlérisme entiché d’irrationalisme” (a late Bergsonian in favor of

Hitlerism approving of Hitler’s passion for irrationality”).6 For Bataille, what mattered was the

link between death, sex and the sacred, while Caillois was more interested in the links

between power and the sacred. But it is also true to say that, even though they disapproved of

anti-Semitism and war, both were fascinated by fascist symbolism and the mourning rituals of

Nazism as in the now lost lectures by Bataille on “Power” (19 February 1938) and on “Hitler

and the Teutonic order” (24 January 1939) while, in Vent d’hiver, a paper he gave in March

1937, Caillois writes that

[t]hese times are not for mercy. A great subversive wind is rising in the world, a cold, harsh, artic wind, one of these deadly but so healthy winds which kill the weak, the sick and the birds, winds that to not allow one to live through the winter”.7

The image here may be regarded as an echo of Shakespeare’s song in As You Like It, “Blow,

blow, thou winter wind/Thou art not so unkind/As man’s ingratitude” (2.7.). In the forest of

Arden, the Old Duke’s stoic philosophy denounces man’s cruelty to man. Caillois, as to him,

seems to take it as some sort of necessary evil. But in 1937, in those troubled times in France,

when Léon Blum was the Prime Minister of the so-called ‘Front populaire’, Caillois’s paper

raised eyebrows as well as some concerns. Indeed, the director of the Gallimard journal La

Nouvelle Revue Française Jean Paulhan wondered then “But why is the NRF turning

fascist?”8

Bataille and Caillois’s fascination with primitive ritual and sacrifice, shared by leading

modernist authors such as D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot, is certainly one of the

features of the period and it has had a strong influence on literary criticism and philosophy.

And, as we shall see, René Girard in The Violence and the Sacred, a book published in 1972,

echoes them at a distance when he claims that “the life and death of the monarchic idea in

6 Marcel Mauss, Cahiers pour un temps, Paris, 1981, p. 205.7 « Vent d’hiver » in Roger Caillois, Oeuvres, ed. Dominique Rabourdin, Gallimard (Quarto), Paris, 2008, p. 261.8 In Roger Caillois, Œuvres, p. 45.

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France, with its sacred rites, its fools, its cure through the royal touch, and of course the grand

finale of the guillotine constitute a general pattern whose underlying structure remains the

interaction of violence and the sacred”.9 Caillois’s description of the sacred underpins much of

Shakespearean tragedy in the shadows, echoes, and vestiges of rituals often overtly found in

the plays. That is more than a matter of language as, combined with specifically ritualistic

procedures, the words and actions of Shakespeare’s tragic characters reflect the plays’

suspension in the dialectic which Caillois describes.

In Shakespeare’s Festive World, I argued that it is as vain as wrong-headed to try to

read Shakespeare’s allusions to and uses of ritual and festive practices according to one or two

all-embracing concepts like those of sacrifice or carnival, since folklorists and historians teach

us that many of those traditions or remnants of the past are rooted both in the mentalités and

in the yearly calendar. Even though there may be explicit or secret correspondences or

affinities between winter and summer festivals, these should be treated differently according

to different meanings and perspectives. The winter half of the calendar which ran from

November 1st to May 1st is indeed marked by the fact that it contains fixed as well as

moveable feasts while the Summer half is characterized by the predominance of fixed

festivals. The first half is mostly marked by sacred or ritual time, the second by secular

occasions. So, in keeping with the season and the approach of Hallowe’en, I will focus on the

meaning and importance of a number of winter festivals in Shakespeare’s oeuvre.

In his Ecclesiastical history, Bede explains that the name for October meant the

coming of winter, while that for November signified ‘blood month’ (‘Blod-monath’) because,

according to him, it derived from the annual slaughter in early winter of livestock which could

not be fed through the winter and had to be salted as well as a sacrifice to the gods. This was

done on the feast of St Martin, or Martinmas, on November 11th, which acquired a reputation

for feasting, gluttony and merry making.10 In 1 Henry IV, 1.2.94-95, Poins calls Falstaff ‘the

Martlemas’ and later he is compared by Hal to “the roasted Martinmas ox with the pudding in

his belly” (2.5.412-13). These customs had been traditionally attached to the Celtic festival of

Samhain (‘sow-in’). Interestingly, in November 1929, in a journal called Documents (issue

N°6), Bataille published an article on the abattoirs de La Villette in Paris. This is mainly a

long commentary on two photographs by Eli Lotar, suggesting that, far from revealing the

violence of the slaughterhouse, they repress it as ‘cursed and quarantined like a plague-ridden

ship’. Such squeamishness, according to Bataille, leads modern man to avert his eyes from the

9 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Paris, Grasset, 1972, p. 456.10 Bede, Works, ed. J.A. Giles (1843), vol. 6, p. 178-9.

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daily slaughter of thousands of animals in the heart of the city. He then argues that “the

abattoir is linked to religion in the sense that the temples of bygone eras had a double purpose,

serving both prayer and killing”.

In Richard III, the past participle ‘butchered’ is used five times and the plural

‘butcheries’ twice so as to refer to the shambles of Shakespeare’s zany mass-murderer.

Richard of Gloucester, who opens with the words ‘winter’ and ‘discontent’, may indeed be

regarded as one of Shakespeare’s winter kings. Later in the play, as the Third Citizen, who

warns against the danger of the Duke of Gloucester, puts it, “when great leaves fall, then

winter is at hand” (Richard III, 2.3.33). Indeed, in his bloody race upwards to the throne,

Gloucester runs through the kingdom like an icy gust of wind which reverses the course of

time and of natural cycles. Like a “Lord of Misrule”, he is both victimizer and victim (at the

end), a modern Herod responsible for a new slaughter of innocents. And, as he seems to be

going against the grain of history, he becomes identified with the scourge and plague which

fulfills the prophecy of the Bishop of Carlisle in Richard II:

My lord of Hereford here, whom you call king,Is a foul traitor to proud Hereford’s king;And, if you crown him, let me prophesyThe blood of English shall manure the ground,And future ages groan for this foul act (4.1.125-29).

So Richard wields the butcher’s bloody axe while amusing himself with all sorts of antics and

buffooneries as he spreads doubt and perplexes both court and country. He is a sphinx whose

conumdrums and riddles may be turned into death sentences if he receives no answer, as

Buckingham learns to his own dismay:

Why then, All-Souls’ day is my body’s doomsday […]This, this All-Souls’ day to my fearful soulIs the determin’d respite of my wrongs:That high All-seer which I dallied withHath turn’d my feigned prayer on my head,And given in earnest what I begg’d in jest (5.1.11-22).

In this, Buckingham behaves like Richard’s faithful disciple since the Machiavellian

dissembler claims to be able to resort to suave and pious words in order to look like some

saintly figure:

But then I sigh, and, with a piece of Scripture, Tell them that God bids us do good for evil:

And thus I clothe my naked villainy

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With odd old ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ,And seem a saint, when most I play the devil (I.3.334-38).

So, this future ‘king of shreds and patches’ (Hamlet, 3.4.102), as the phrase “odd, old ends”

suggests can clothe himself in ecclesiastical garb and play the part of the “Boy Bishop”, the

mock-bishop elected in England during a period that went from St Nicholas (December 6) to

Holy Innocents Day (December 28). The “Boy Bishop” put on the bishop’s mitre and

delivered a foolish sermon to the audience as recorded in the archives of Lincoln cathedral.

This was a festive parody of church power with rites of inversion reminiscent of the ancient

Roman Saturnalia. So, like the “Boy Bishop”, Richard will preach burlesque or hypocritical

sermons similar to the one he delivers to the Citizens and Mayor of London (3.7.223-35) and

that turn him into what Bernard Spivack has called a “homiletic showman”.11

A perverse and capricious boy indulging in all the whims and follies of his short

interregnum, Richard asks the Bishop of Ely to go and fetch some strawberries in his Holborn

garden (3.4.31-33). This is a trick only meant to surprise the ‘traitor’ Hastings in a scene

which is a real “freak show” avant la lettre:

Rich. See how I am bewitch’d! Behold mine armIs like a blasted sapling wither’d up!And this is Edward’s wife, that monstrous witch,Consorted with that harlot, strumpet Shore,That by this witchcraft thus have mark’d me.

Hast. If they have done this deed, my noble lord—

Rich. If? Thou protector of this damned strumpet,Talkest thou to me of ifs! Thou art a traitor:Off with his head! Now by St Paul I swearI will not dine until I see the same (3.4.68-76).

Before his execution, Hastings can only regret that he triumphed in seeing his enemies

bloodily butchered earlier the same day while he thought himself “secure in grace and favour”

(Richard III, 3.4.93). When Lovell and Ratcliffe bring him Hastings’s head in the next scene,

they show to the Lord Mayor in order to frighten him and teach him a lesson about the fate of

traitors. This type of ‘Grand Guignol’ harks back at the Jack Cade episode in 2 Henry VI (4.4-

10), where the clothier rebel also relished the show of severed heads in a bloody carnival

marked by such an association of cruelty and derisiveness.12

11Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil, New York, 1958, p. 151.12See François Laroque, “The Jack Cade Scenes Reconsidered: Popular Rebellion, Utopia, or Carnival?” in Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells eds., Shakespeare and the Cultural Traditions (The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991), University of

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Now, in the second tetralogy, Richard II, as “mockery king of snow” (4.1.250), looks

like a mock king of misrule after he has undone himself in an uncanny rite of uncrowning.

Richard insists on the idea that his deposition does not simply coincide with the devesting or

undecking of his body of the sacred garments bestowed upon him during the coronation

ceremony. Such undoing is a rite of inversion, a form of sacrilege in which the king plays

‘both priest and clerk’ at the unholy office of his own desecration. He becomes a celebrant at

the Feast of Fools in a cruel game where he must be fooled and fool himself as well in order

to comply with the desires of York and Bolingbroke. It is obvious that unmaking and

uncrowning are here turned into forms of royal deconstruction. This leads him to

acknowledge his own insubstantiality after denying both himself and his name:

Alack the heavy day,That I have worn so many winters outAnd know not what name to call myself (4.1.247-49).

The association of ‘winter’ with his current status as ‘king in jest’ or mock king, leads to the

visual conceit of the ‘mockery king of snow’, a nutshell image of his current insignificance

before he is sent to Pomfret to be executed or rather sacrificed. And in the farewell scene with

his queen, Richard once again resorts to wintry images:

Part us Northumberland: I towards the north,Where shivering cold and sickness pines the clime;My queen to France, from whence set forth in pompShe came adorned hither like sweet May,Sent back like Hallowmas or short’st day (5.2.76-80)

Through his allusion to Hallowmas, the winter king presents himself as a pharmakos, an

inverted image of the king as well as the emissary victim of Bolingbroke’s violence.13 When

he dies in the brutal assault in his prison cell, Richard accuses Exton, the new king’s man,

“Exton, thy fierce hand/Hath with the king’s blood stained the King’s own land” (5.5.110).

But when, after banishing Exton whom he sentences to “wander through the shades of night”

(5.6.43), the newly crowned Henry IV vows to “make a voyage to the Holy Land/To wash

this blood off from [his] guilty hand” (49-50), he echoes Richard’s last words by using the

same ‘hand’/‘land’ rhyme as Richard but in an inverted pattern. Such reversal makes his vow

ring hollow (he will in fact never go to the Holy Land, even though, ironically, he dies in a

Delaware Press, Newark, Associated University Presses, London and Toronto, 1994, pp. 76-89.13 See Jean-Pierre Vernant, « Ambiguïté et renversement : sur la structure énigmatique d’Œdipe roi » in Jean-Pierre Vernant et Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Œdipe et ses mythes, ed. Complexe, Bruxelles, 2006, p. 37.

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room called ‘Jerusalem’) just as it foreshadows his own ‘unquiet reign’. In the words of

Dominique Goy-Blanquet,

The king must be killed and his blood shed to sprinkle the growth of the new dynasty, as in the most archaic succession rites […] The agony of medieval sacred monarchy and its civic reconstruction ‘when miracles are ceased’ (Henry V, 1.1.67) reinterprets the primitive murder of the father as the rites of passage into adulthood”.14

But the ghost of the dead king is not that easily dispelled and it will keep preying upon the

Plantagenet kings, just like the ghosts of Richard III’s victims come to haunt and disturb his

sleep on the eve of the battle of Bosworth.

II. Spectres of Shakespeare

The wintry season of Hallowmas, hinted at by Richard II, is indeed a critical one. In

his discussion of transgression as a modality of the sacred, Roger Caillois mentions the

moments in the year when the dead return among the living and which coincide with whant

anthropologists call liminal periods of time.15 Whether the religion involved was of

Mediterranean or Nordic origin, in the pagan world this festival (Todtenfest) marked a crucial

point in the year linked with beliefs that this was indeed the time when the souls of the dead

returned to haunt the living.

Shakespeare seems to have had a a good personal knowledge of the complexities of

the old calendar, which he used for the computation of time in his plays, with an undeniable

nostalgia for the old days and old ways, as in Romeo and Juliet, for instance, with a character

like the Nurse who keeps referring to Lammastide instead of July 31st or St Peter-in-the-

Chains. Shakespeare probably appropriated the old system because of its multiple internal as

well as external correspondences and echoes and also because it provided him with a rich

storehouse of images, names, proverbs and puns. I have argued elsewhere that the Nurse’s

allusion to Lammastide, one of the four Celtic festivals of the year, contains an oblique

reference to Hallowe’en by linking Juliet’s birthday on July 31st with the probable date of her

conception during the night when ghosts and the souls of the dead were believed to walk and

14 Shakespeare’s Early History Plays. From Chronicle to Stage, Oxford, OUP, 2003, pp. 292-93 (note 23).15 Roger Caillois, Le mythe et l’homme (1938), Paris, Gallimard, 1950, pp. 150-51.

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come back among the living. This uncanny association, which was part of the judicial “art of

memory” known as “backward reckoning” (“supputation retrograde”),16 consisted in counting

nine months back in time in order to determine the date of conception of the child and to

asceretain its being legitimate. Indeed, when we count nine months back from July 31st, we

are brought back to October 31st, the date of Hallowe’en...

Such computation is not far removed from the art of casting horoscopes and

nativities mocked by Edmund in King Lear when he alludes to his own conception and to

the adultery of his father, the duke of Gloucester, in a sarcastic and fairly grotesque way:

My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.17

A skeptic and a libertine,18 Edmund, as an adept of the “goddess” Nature, refuses to indulge in

any sort of magical thinking of the type illustrated by his father or by the credulous,

superstitious Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. While the Nurse is entirely contained and

determined by customs, by calendar traditions and random family memories, as in her

rambling stream of consciousness, he refers to “the plague of custom” (I.2.3).

In his study of The Night Battles (I Benandanti), Carlo Ginzburg quotes evidence

found in the church records of XVIth century Verona and he establishes a connection between

the theme of the nocturnal ridings and the popular beliefs about the “wild hunt” of Germanic

folklore which involves a deity alternately called Diana, Perchta ou Holda:

Even Diana-Hecate was followed in her nocturnalwanderings by a band of the dead for whom therewas no peace: people taken by death before their time, children snatched away at an early age, victims of a violent death.19

16 The expression is used by Rabelais in his Quart Livre (Fourth Book). See my “Tradition and Subversion in Romeo and Juliet”, in Jay L. Halio ed., Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Texts, Contexts, and Interpretation, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 1995, p. 24, and Shakespeare’s Festive World, p. 205.17 King Lear, R.A. Foakes ed., London, Thomson Learning, 2000 [1997], I.2.128-33.18 See William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, Lexington,The University Press of Kentucky, 1988, pp. 125-30.19The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press,1982, p. 36.

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A little further in his book, Ginzburg mentions what he calls “the link between the dead and

the fertility of the fields”. If the daughter of the Capulets was probably conceived on a date

when the territory of the dead encroached on that of the living, Juliet is then intimately

connected with ‘little Susan’, the Nurse’s daughter who died in infancy (I.3.196) and thus

who joined before her the troop of the prematurely dead. Such symbolic correlation brings

together a wintry, nocturnal date linked to the forces of thanatos and it reveals the existence

of a shadowy world underneath the surface celebration of youth, desire and light which

contributes to erase the borders between love and death.

Furthermore, the mysterious ‘Queen Mab’, who makes a brief apparition in Mercutio’s

famous soliloquy (1.4.55-94), is another of the many ghost characters in the play. She gallops

like the ‘night mare’ ‘through ‘lovers’ brains’ to make them ‘dream of love’ (l. 72). As such,

she is the signifier of desire but she is also Mercutio’s doppelgänger as she looks like a

miniature reflection or projection of his own darker self as jester freezing into ‘a grave man’

(3.1.94). An ‘elf-lock’ baker, Mab bodes ‘much misfortune’ when she ‘presses’ the maids

who ‘lie on their back’, an image which foreshadows Juliet’s future and ominous sleep of

death. As a ‘hag’ (l. 92), Mab is a forerunner of the weird Sisters in Macbeth, whose

‘supernatural solliciting’ (1.3.129), first seen as ‘happy prologues to the swelling act’ (127)

soon leads to ‘horrible imaginings’ with the apparition of the ‘blood-boltered Banquo’

(4.1.139). Mab, like these harbingers of death, is cursed for the poisoned visions she

produces. As ‘night hag’, Mab is a demonic figure that brings death and doom and she also

crosses the boundaries between the living and the dead. As Macbeth exclaims when he seeing

the dead Banquo before him at the banquet,

If charnel-houses and our graves must sendThose that we bury back, our monumentsShall be the maws of kites […]

Hence, horrible shadow,Unreal mockery, hence! (3.4.70-2, 105-106)

As the night dance in Verona is followed by the duel where Mercutio and Tybalt both lose

their lives, we are presented with Juliet’s terror in front of “the horrible conceit of death and

night/ Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth/[Lying] fest’ring in his shroud” and

“where, as they say,/At some hours night spirits resort” (4.3.36-43). The tragedy then moves

towards its bloody ending where, in the words of Old Capulet, the young lovers are now

presented as martyrs, as the “poor sacrifices of our enmity” (5.3.302).

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In The Winter’s Tale, the demented king calls Paulina a ‘mankind witch’ and a ‘hag’

when he wavers between having the baby girl ‘instantly consumed with fire’ (2.3.132) or

dashing out ‘the bastard brains with these [his] proper hands’ (ll. 138-39), thus rolling into

one the two parts of Macbeth and his ‘fiend-like queen’. As Leontes turns the fruitful

kingdom of Sicilia into a waste land, his way of life, like Macbeth’s, “is fall’n into the sere,

the yellow leaf” (5.3.23-4). The death of young prince Mamillius and the swooning of

Hermione, soon reported to be dead, immediately follow his denial of Apollo’s oracle. As to

Paulina’s husband, Antigonus, whose vision in a dream of the ‘dead’ queen (“I have heard

[…] that the spirits of the dead/May walk again”, 3.3.15-16)) leads him to to believe

‘superstitiously’ that the child is “indeed the issue/Of King Polixenes” (l. 43), he is instantly

punished for this mistake by being pursued and devoured by a bear. But, as we are to discover

after the Chorus of Time, his involuntary sacrifice is followed by the return of fertility, by the

long sheep-shearing scene of the Bohemian rite of spring.

Contrary to the ‘recreation’ which is made possible in the never never world of

tragicomedy, tragedy, according to Richard Wilson’s critique of René Girard, does not end

with “a war to end war”, as in Julius Caesar, where, in Antony’s views, Brutus and Cassius

and the conspirators as a whole are nothing but ‘butchers’ who stand on the ‘slippery ground’

saturated Caesar’s blood” (3.1.192, 257). And what Shakespeare stages in his Roman tragedy

is “the eternal return of these ghosts”.

III. A theatre of blood

While he occasionally refers to Shakespeare (to Ulysses’s speech on ‘degree’ in

Troilus and Cressida and to Richard II), René Girard, in Violence and the Sacred (1972),

mainly analyses Greek tragedy, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Euripides’ The Bacchae in

particular. His main thesis is that the flaring violence created by mimetic desire can only be

put an end to by the sacrifice of an emissary victim, or scapegoat, an efficient religious rite

which has then progressively been turned into a ‘foundational’ mechanism, a unanimous

process endowed with divine sanction and whose efficacy must rest on its remaining

unacknowledged and veiled. According to him, what Greek tragedy represents is what he calls

the sacrificial crisis and the founding violence:

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Ritual violence is always less inbred than originary violence. When it is turned into a ritualized myth, violence is displaced outwards and this displacement has in itself a sacrificial character: it conceals the place of originary violence as it protects from that violence and from an awareness of that violence the elementary social group in the midst of which peace must absolutely reign.20

The point, in other words, is that the function of religion in civilization is to replace originary

violence by a form of symbolic sacrifice, from human to animal, to mimetic ritual, which then

becomes a mere substitute until it reaches a point of no return where violence is sublimated.

Yet, according to Wilson, the reverse may also be true. In Shakespeare, metaphor also

collapses into metonymy and ritual reverses to savagery, and then we can smell the uncleanly

savours of the slaughterhouse” (King John, 4.3.112) and “barrow of butchers’ offal” (Merry

Wives, 3.5.5). It is interesting at this point to underline the fact that, in Shakespeare’s plays,

metaphors of sacrifice as slaughter are reversible and are used in his comedies as well as in

the tragedies. In As You Like It, for example, Oliver’s house is described by Adam as a

‘butchery’ (2.3.28), while the hunted, sobbing deer in the forest of Arden is successively

described as a “hairy fool” and as a “fat and greasy citizen[s]” (2.1.55). Conversely, Caesar is

assimilated to a slain hart in Julius Caesar (“Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods,/Not

hew him as a carcass fit for hounds”, 2.1.173-74) and punningly by Hamlet to ‘so capital a

calf’ when Polonius tells him that he “did enact Julius Caesar” and “was killed I’th’Capitol”

(Hamlet, 3.2.93-5). The imagery of the duel and the dance is just as reversible in Romeo and

Juliet and Twelfth Night.21 But, for Girard, Caesar’s assassination reconfigures “the

foundational violence of the Roman empire”, “a mysterious consummation which makes the

pax romana possible” when Brutus interprets sacrifice as a re-enactment of the expulsion of

Tarquin with a different victim to rejuvenate the existing order”. Naomi Liebler provides a

similar analysis of this political reading of sacrifice and festive ritual when she writes that

Brutus’s design for the conspirators as “sacrificers, but not butchers” and “purgers, not murderers” occurs in the context of those cultural redefinitions: he would reverse the opening scene’s transformation of a religious event to a secular one […]. Indeed, for Brutus, the language of politics is simultaneously the language of religious ritual.22

20 René Girard, La violence et le sacré (1972), Paris, Fayard, 2010, p. 370 (my translation). 21 On this see “Bloody as the Hunter” in R. Wilson, Shakespeare in French Theory, p. 214.22 Shakespeare’s Festive Tragedy. The ritual foundation of genre (1995), p. 92.

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The function of the imagery of butchery in the play, Wilson suggests, is “to expose the fallacy

of any such attempt to erect a cordon sanitaire around sacrificial violence […], the

impossibility of rigging a semiotic quarantine around the signifiers of death”.23 Hamlet’s sick

joke that “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (Hamlet, 4.3.27) is a

shocking egalitarian image with strong cannibal innuendoes that presents culture as an endless

cycle of violence. This applies to the bloody carnival of Jack Cade who, along with his

henchman, Dick the butcher of Ashford, is a cartoon-like embodiment of the plebeian blood-

lust described in Leroy-Ladurie’s Carnival in Romans. Carnival, the French historian

explains, is the place where Christian flesh is metaphorically sold at a low price (“Trois

deniers la chair du chrétien”) and which seems to foreshadow the image of the Sans Culottes

as the ‘blood drinkers’ of the French revolution.24

In the Jack Cade scenes in 2 Henry VI, particular emphasis is indeed laid on the figure

of Dick the Butcher who is rewarded for his expedient slaughter of the Stafford brothers with

special licence during Lent:

Cade They fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behaved’st thyself as if thou hadst been in thine own slaughter-house; therefore thus will I reward thee : the Lent shall be as long again as it is; and thou shalt have a licence to kill for a hundred lacking one (4.3.3-7).

That a butcher should turn executioner would seem to correspond to the logic of his trade as he is used to spilling blood. Indeed, to Holland’s announcement of the arrival of Dick the butcher, Bevis adds in a grim proleptic pun,

Then is sin struck down like an ox, and iniquity’s throatcut like a calf (IV.2.20-2).

These lines call attention to the carnivalesque nature of the rebellion as the guild of butchers was a highly prominent one in Carnival periods, just as it serves to unmetaphor the image of butchery in King Henry’s sad and powerless commentary after the dismissal of Gloucester:

And as the butcher takes away the calfAnd binds the wretch and beats it when it strains,Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house,Even so remorseless have they borne him hence (3.1.210-13)

The numerous severed heads (Suffolk’s, Lord Say’s and Sir James Cromer’s and Jack Cade’s at the end) serve as so many bloody icons reminiscent of the sacrificial mayhem played at all

23 “A Bleeding Head Where They Begun” in Shakespeare in French Theory, p. 187-88.24 Carnival in Romans, New York, 1979, p. 198, note 57.

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levels of society in the first tetralogy. In their mixture of buffoonery and horror, the demotic scenes repeat the leitmotiv of division and misrule in the kingdom to produce what the first gentleman calls a “barbarous and bloody spectacle” (4.1.144) when he sees Suffolk’s severed head. The use of festive and traditional patterns did not in itself preclude cruelty or sadism as many popular rituals of the day staged symbolic executions or dismemberment. Elizabethan tragedy was a festive show consciously reworking the barbarities at Tyburn, that in theatre’s realistic representations of massacre needed a constant supply of fresh blood and entrails from the butchers. In that connection, Wilson reminds us that “the butchers played the devils in the Mystery plays, swinging sausages to symbolise the innards of the damned” and that “it was festive mayhem which illicitly supplied the London playhouses with their blood-baths, which were vats of fresh calves’ blood drained at the city’s meat market”.25 Michael Hattaway, who quotes the sardonic tone of Holinshed in a marginal gloss to a passage describing the burning of the records of the realm by the unruly commons (“Lawyers, justices, and jurors brought to ‘blockam feast’ by the rebels”), remarks that “this reconstitutes the slaughter into a carnival of violence”. But when Cade’s head is presented to the king in the next act, this provisionally puts an end to a long cycle of violence. Yet, quite ironically, it foreshadows the death of the Duke of York in 3Henry VI after Clifford has killed his son Rutland and Margaret wants to make him mad by giving him a napkin stained with his son’s blood to wipe his face. Then she humiliates him by putting a paper crown on his head to turn him into a mock king as well as into a pathetic Christ figure:

She puts a paper crown on York’s head

Ay, marry sir, now looks like a king […]But how is it that great PlantagenetIs crowned so soon and broke his solemn oath?As I bethink me, you should not be kingTill our king Henry had shook hands with death.

To which York retorts:

That face of his the hungry cannibalsWould not have touched, would not have stained with blood—But you are more inhuman, more inexorable,O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania (1.4.96-103, 153-56).

But in turn, the same Margaret will suffer excruciating pain at the death of her son, Prince Edward, successively stabbed to death by the three York brothers, Edward, Clarence and Richard:

O traitors, murderers!They that stabbed Caesar shed no blood at all,

25 Richard Wilson, op. cit., p. 176-77.

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Did not offend, nor were not worthy blameIf this foul deed were by to equal it […]Butchers and villains! Bloody cannibals! (3 Henry VI, 5.5.51-60)

The same type of imagery runs through these repetitive scenes of violence and murder: ‘butcher’, ‘blood’, ‘cannibals’. The internecine violence of the war of the Roses turns murder into massacre and into primitive rites of human sacrifice which, contrary to Girard’s Christian and fairly optimistic thesis, far from putting an end to endemic violence, only serve to push it a bit further each time. This comes closer to Bataille’s theory of gratuitous sacrifice, which is pure expenditure and letting loose of energy, the antithesis of production, and a festival of consumption and destruction where dance, drunkenness, orgy and crime come to a paroxysm to reach a climax in some sort of incendiary fire. So, the bloody carnival of Jack Cade looks forward to the sinister misrule of Richard of Gloucester, whom Prince Edward had just nicknamed “misshapen Dick” (l. 35), since he will turn the wild lies and bloody antics of the popular leader into a form of jocular terror so as to secure the golden round of kingship and to turn murder into an art and slaughter into a form of government. Christian critics like Girard believe that religion moves from human to animal to symbolic sacrifice, that its progress is one of successive substitutions. But, to Montaigne’s own dismay, civilisation, as shown by the Wars of religion, was then drenched in blood, and as Wilson argues, “Shakespeare’s indelible stage-blood is a material reminder that there is nothing inevitable about this process of symbolisation, and that the arts themselves feed on corpses. [With] Julius Caesar on the stage of the Globe, it was a human sacrifice the English Capitol would itself soon see acted”.26

Incidentally, the first performance of Julius Caesar coincided with the inauguration of Shakespeare’s Globe. So, in a way, the representation of Caesar’s assassination served as a ritual foundation of the new playhouse on the summer solstice of 1599.

One final element to take into account is war as a form of festival and sacrificial ritual, according to Roger Caillois:

[War] may satisfy the instincts suppressed by civilization and which, under its tutelage, offer a superb form of revenge, which consists in self-annihilation and in the possibility to destroy everything around; in indulging in one’s own doom, in hurting everything that has a form and a name. It provides a double and sumptuous outlet to the ennui of living among such mean prohibitions and cautious voluptuousness. A monstrous inter-blending of societies, war intensifies their existence until it reaches a climax, a time of sacrifice. But it also breaks every sort of rule as, with the deadly but gratifying risk of self-sacrifice and licence, war has all titles to replacing festivity in the modern world and to creating the same mesmerizing attraction and enthusiasm. It is inhuman and that is enough for it to be deemed divine […]. And it

26 Wilson, op. cit., p. 200.

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is from this form of consecration that ecstasy, youth and immortality may be attained.27

This suggests that, for the hero, the blood-bath is a form of baptism. Macbeth’s fight against the ruthless Macdonwald is presented in the second scene of the tragedy as an awful carnage where there is no place for chivalry:

Captain For brave Macbeth –well he deserves that name–Disdaining fortune, with his brandished steel,Which smoked with bloody execution,Like valour’s minion carvèd out his passageTill he faced the slave –Which ne’er shook hands nor bade farewell to himTill he unseamed him from the nave to the chops,And fixed his head upon our battlements (1.2.16-23).

The heat of martial combat produces a certain wild joy, a form of perverse jouissance in

which heroic feats are endowed with an excitement close to erotic sensation. When speaking

of ‘Bellona's bridegroom’, Sir Peter Hall indeed remarked that “[Macbeth] doesn’t just kill: he

kills with a kind of celebratory relish”.28

At this juncture, one also thinks of Henry V’s horrifying threats in front of the besieged city of Harfleur:

The gates of mercy shall all be shut up,And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,In liberty of bloody hand shall rangeWith conscience wide as hell, mowing like grassYour fresh virgins, and flowering infants.What is it to me, if impious war,Arrayed in flames, like to the prince of fiends,Do, with his smirched complexion, all fell featsEnlinked to waste and desolation? (3.3.10-18).

Here Shakespeare’s style is close to Marlowe’s Tragedie of Dido which it indirectly echoes and which he had used in his Henriad and in the Player’s speech on Priam and Hecuba in Hamlet (2.2.446-514). These scenes of carnage and butchery are endowed with an uncanny, intoxicating power where murder appears less macabre than grand and awesome thanks to the magic of language and of verse, where the energy of the images is added to the clear-cut neatness and precision of the description as well as to the rapidity of the gestures that lead to the execution and disemboweling of the enemy. No sooner has the traitor been unseamed from the nave to the chops than his head appears on a pike at the top of the walls. War is here

27 L’homme et le sacré, p. 237-38 (my translation). 28 “Directing Macbeth” in Focus on Macbeth, ed. John Russell Brown, 1982, p. 245.

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the equivalent of a pagan cult with its savage rites, it is a confraternity of men of blood, as in the ‘were-wolves’ of the Lupercalia, “a sadistic riot of sexual male energy […] which Georges Dumézil has decoded […] as a cultic reversion to the ‘type of feral and brutal brotherhood’”.29 In Mythes et dieux des Germains, Dumézil describes the old German warriors dressed in wolves or bears’ skins (the berserkir), as the disciples of the pagan war deity Ohdin, and who originally personified the army of the dead (Todtenheer). War, whether past or present, is thus made to coincide with the return of ancient myths or deities praising ferocity, aggressiveness and self-sacrifice as in Coriolanus where the hero in battle is “from face to foot/[…] a thing of blood” (2.2.104-105) before being successively compared to a dragon and to some implacable killing machine. Yet, Caius Martius crumbles at the end after his mother, wife and son kneel before him to beg him save Rome and his family from destruction. His weakness or his humanity then appears as the wolf and warlord banished by the consuls and the plebeians chooses to yield and to sacrifice himself in the end. The gods now laugh on Coriolanus (“The gods look down, and this unnatural scene/They laugh at”, 5.4.185-86) who gives up the idea of revenge in some sort of apocalyptic destruction and who uncannily, yet humanely, chooses to destroy himself instead:

Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,If not most mortal to him (5.4.189-90)

Conclusion

I will close by remarking how ironical it is that this survey of the contribution to Shakespeare studies of the French theory of the late 1930’s, very much under the shadow of the anthropological studies of Marcel Mauss and Georges Dumézil, later revisited by René Girard in a more acceptable Christianized interpretation of the therapeutic function of pagan sacrifice, should lead us back to the primitive violence of pagan times.

Indeed, to read the Lupercalia in Julius Caesar as a Carnival of the ‘end-of-winter

maskers of early modern Europe’ makes the ferocity of the ‘wolf-race’ an outbreak of

irrationality, virility and violence where ritual reverts to savagery. So, what Wilson ironically

calls the ‘shamanism’ of the Collège de Sociologie appears as poles apart from the new

humanism and optimism put forward by Derrida who praises Shakespeare’s universality and

cult of hospitality away from the demonization of strangers and Jews.

All the same, Shakespeare, the ‘king of shadows’, the butcher’s son turned

playwright, fascinated by blood and violence, re-appears here as Voltaire’s “base, boorish and

barbarous” playwright, as the incarnation of the ‘medieval gothicity’ which haunted French

29 Wilson, op. cit., p. 181.

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thinking before 1789. But, with the Terror of 1793, Shakesperean barbarity resurfaced in the

heart of civilisation and episodes like the bloody carnival of Jack Cade became uncannily

prophetic of the savage massacres perpetrated against recusant priests and aristocrats, with

heads being daily exhibited through the streets of Paris on the popular pikes of the Sans

Culottes. History proved that Shakespeare’s disgusting improprieties on stage were in fact

quite premonitory contrary to the dictatorship of ‘decorum’ and good taste then prevailing in

French enlightenment culture (we would nowadays speak of ‘political correctness’). And,

according to Wilson, in the Post-Revolution period, “Shakespeare does confirm Sade’s view

in its fixation on nocturnal violence”.30

In my own reading, it would be wrong to limit Shakespeare to this sensational and

horrifying spectacle of blood and violence, in spite of Titus Andronicus, whose human

sacrifices, rape and mutilation scenes and cannibal banquet as a grand finale to a feast of

horrors, essentially reflect the strong influence of Seneca and Marlowe. Shakespeare always

adds a humane dimension to his monsters and criminals, and his final message always

remains enigmatic or ambiguous. In Julius Caesar, Calphurnia’s dream is diversely

interpreted as the bleeding statue of Caesar is both a foreshadowing of his imminent murder

as well as a ‘vision [...] fair and fortunate/[...] [where] great Rome shall suck/Reviving

blood…” (2.2.84-8). Later on, according to Mark Antony, the bloody hands of the

conspirators are “Signed in thy [Caesar’s] spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe” (3.1.205-206). He

then invites the commons to “kiss dead Caesar’s wounds,/And dip their napkins in his sacred

blood” (3.2.133-34). So it would seem that Shakespeare actually christianizes pagan sacrifice

while referring to Catholic martyrology and to the cult of relics. And, in a way, the sad stories

of the deaths of kings in the two tetralogies as in the tragedies could be read as the secular

equivalent of religious martyrdom (this is particularly obvious in the case of Richard II and

Henry VI). In Macbeth, Duncan’s blood is sacralised by some sort of alchemical

transformation when it is described as ‘golden’, while the ‘murderers’ daggers are

“unmannerly breeched with gore” (2.3.109, 113), with impure blood. We stand here on

‘slippery ground’ (3.1.192) as the material fact that the London actors “were soaked from

bladders of offal and gore”31 in the Globe’s realistic rendering of violence since butchery does

not necessarily mean that Shakespeare took for granted the idea that carnival meant massacre

and that his plays anticipate on the ‘divin marquis’’120 days of Sodom, Bataille’s mystical

association of sex, death and the sacred in his ritualized and tormented pornography, or on

30 Op. cit., p. 40.31 Wilson, op. cit., p. 177.

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Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’. If René Girard’s Christian reading of Shakespeare in A Theater

of Envy is far from convincing when it forces the plays and the poems into a unique mould or

system, that of mimetic desire and of the crisis of differences, it also has the drawback of

leaving aside a number of plays and examples which it would have been interesting to study

in this particular perspective (I am thinking of Measure for Measure for instance, a play about

which he has almost nothing to say).

Now, whether the carnivalizing of Shakespeare is a specifically French approach, at

least in the eyes of American critics, I leave that to Richard Wilson. 32 Whether we prefer to

“be mocked by art” in a willing suspension of disbelief or to “awake our faith”, whether the

man who “dwelt by a churchyard” is a mourner, a necrophiliac or a Hallowe’en ghost-watcher

at, hoping to see Orderic Vital’s ‘army of the dead’ or Prince Hamlet waiting for the “thing”

to appear again in the night of Elsinore, I can only say, by way of conclusion and to avoid the

risk of embarking on more ‘slippery ground’, that “a sad tale” is indeed “best for winter”.

32 Ibidem, p. 176.

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